Sorry I fell off the planet there.

Summer is a really crazy time for me, mostly because the last week in July is SUUSI which means last-minute SOLIS fixes. This year was my 20th SUUSI, every year since 1989 (except for 1992, when I met Emily at GHP). For the past 2 years, I’ve been building a Very Large Rails app called SOLIS to handle all of the registration, workshops, scheduling, credit card processing … it’s the brain behind a lot of SUUSI. I still surprise myself with how useful it is sometimes.

Case in point: Friday night at the play, a woman came in with a lost kid. He didn’t know his room #, Dad’s cell #, anything. So I pulled SOLIS up on the iPhone, looked him up, had his Dad’s cell # and his Grandmother’s home # ready to go. 2 years ago, we would have had to try and find someone with access to the computer system, or paper printouts. I wrote the thing, and I still got excited using it.

It’s Thursday night now, nearly a week since we got home, and I’m still not 100%. I can’t really explain what SUUSI is like, or why all of us who go need a week or two to decompress when we get home. It’s the longest week of my year, though.

In other news…I kinda mentioned, but didn’t really blog about the fact that Don and I started a new company. Divvs gives you a way to take the value of your social network connections and represent it with a numerical rating. We’re still working on our rating algorithm, but we’ve come a long way in a few months.

Chapter 2 of the book is available in Early Access.

I’ll be at the Ruby Hoedown next week. Oh, and I’ll be in Atlanta on the 4th, if anyone wants to get together for dinner at Manuel’s.